ETech Day 2

Etech Audience, originally uploaded by x180.

Ray Ozzie demonstrated a prototype of copy n’ paste for the Web - showing how easy it should be (could be) for users to move data from one Web silo er site to another. Below it all though is common agreed upon, adhered to, data standards such as iCalendar or vCard etc. Given the slow uptake of formats other than RSS (iCalendar might be the next bright spot), I’m not sure we are all that close to this - but every year it gets a little more close to being realized. As always, amusing to see a MSFT demo using firefox. One thing that did really spark me from his presentation today was the idea of ‘everything is a feed’. Exposing as much data as possible via RSS really takes it to the next level when it comes to remixes/mashups.

Jeff Han presented next - looks like it might not be long until we all have our minority report drag n’ drop translucent interfaces. I was blown away at his photo, video, globe demos. Having something like this at home (imagining it on my coffee table or wall) could force me to start building desktop applications again - away from the Web Services model it seems most attention is on these days.

Dick Hardt, formerly of ActiveState and Canadian, gave what was one of the most entertaining presentations so far. He rattled off 1 slide per second - keeping everyone engaged and also getting across his key ideas around identity management. It is a tough space, hopefully they’ll succeed where so many others have failed.

Felix Miller from last.fm gave an overview of their service - not sure why I haven’t plugged into this one yet. He mentioned over 1 billion data points collected last year - with users doing the bulk of the work in terms of cleaning that data. Lots to learn here about harnessing the community and then rewarding them with collective intelligence.

Seth Goldstein unvieled the lastest skin to Root markets - possibly the only spyware I’ll install willingly ;> Think WebTrends for your personal internet usage (amongst other things). Being able to access a dashboard report indicating where I am wasting my time online would be very helpful indeed.

A presentation on Second Life blew my mind - the lines are getting fuzzy when users are creating games to be played inside a game (virtual world) and then selling that IP to market the game back in the physical world. Cory mentioned users generating 2.5 million lines of code per year. That’s one large, distributed, virtual development team.

Didn’t enjoy the presentation from David Sifry (Technorati) as much - didn’t find much meat. To be fair - it must be difficult to cram content into 15 minutes.

Disappointment of the day was a Greasemonkey presentation by Mark Pilgrim. He swaggered back and forth at the front of the room - seeming rather disinterested at times. At one point he put up a slide indicating he probably wouldn’t right another line of javascript again - certainly didn’t get me excited about the future of Greasemonkey. As Mark put it - the future holds, well, ‘more of the same’.